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Genesis mod FAQ and tips, around version 2.99 - 3.25.

"The multiple dwarves is scaring me already—please tell me there's still one goddamn dwarven civ so I don't need to worry about choosing from 20 different civs all with different consequences."
There's one dwarf civ. The goblin civ is a little tougher and the big monsters (hippo, rhino, elephant plus) have tougher skins, muscles, bones, for fun.
There's also a hostile werewolf civ and illithid/mind flayer civ.

It's cool when a hostile starts a forest fire and we have to hide indoors. Too bad ramps/slopes and walls-with-cagetraps block the forest fire.

Each individual dwarf will be assigned to a caste. The stone dwarf caste is the most common. You can see which caste a dwarf belongs to from the Thoughts and Preferences screen.

See the image of the castes on the Genesis thread.
Steel dwarf caste is rare, and great for military. Jade dwarves learn faster. Moss dwarves learn healthcare skills faster, and shroom dwarves learn farming skills faster.
One can remove the dwarven breath attacks, which hurt friendlies and kill war dogs.
Moss dwarves are resistant to poisonous and toxic ghouls and forgotten beast sprays.

Quick guide to metals

1. use any steel. The crucible makes basic steel using flux stone, once you have hammered coarse iron at the Finishing Forge. The crucible steel and pattern welded steel are probably a tiny bit better. Read the raws if you want details.
2. lacking steel, use the three kinds of bronzes, or iron. You need an anvil to make the Finishing Forge, try a coarse iron anvil.
3. failing bronze and iron, it's cobalt or copper time. Cobalt is better than copper. Copper should cost 6 instead of 1, because it makes armor and weapons (unlike Lead)
4. bronze is damn hard to make, because tin is rare. Order tin from the mountainhomes.
5. gold statues, gold tables, gold thrones, gold chests, gold floor tiling…
6. If your civ has ilmenite, bring ilmenite and sand (and embark where there are trees), for extremely cheap black steel shortly after embark.
7. Tetrahedrite only has 70% chance of giving copper, and malachite only has 60%. If you were planning to bring cheap copper ores + cassiterite to make bronze, you may be in for a nasty shock. Speaking of bronze, bronze now needs 4 copper + 1 tin bar.

You can make a uniform that contains a breastplate and TWO chain mails.

Quick guide to cooking

1. Disable cooking and brewing of plants that can be used for bread. Also disable cooking of their flour (mill product) once it shows up. Bake the flour into bread first, then allow that to be used in prepared meals.
2. You'll need barrels (not rock pots) for the various "extractions" (jam, peanut butter, margarine, etc.) due to an upstream DF bug that doesn't allow rock pots to be used in "extract to barrel" jobs. Rock pots can be used for booze or general food storage. Perhaps consider stockpiling barrels near the farmer's workshop and rock pots near the still.
3. Don't forget to grow (and allow brewing) some plants for booze.

Bulldog, A fierce and strong dog with a shorter life expectancy and bad eyesight. (Viewrange creature attribute)

Mephits, pasture
"When dealing with mephits… that while pets cannot be pitted, they can be pastured. I just pasture all my mephits behind a door in a single tile, forbid the door and laugh at the combat reports." —FluidDynamite
Note: you must unpasture a dog or pig before it can be war-trained at the kennel.
Note: small chicken pastures might be actually guard chicken posts. Assign animal to chain, or assign to pasture so the animal can flee.

Miscellaneous

- if a reaction is red (unavailable) in the workshop but you know you have the materials for it, maybe the materials are too far away and you need to make stockpiles near the workshop. Or try adding the job in the job manager queue (j-m-q). Might happen more often with soap maker and alchemy workshop.

- Bath time is happy time: channel a natural or filled-reservoir pool wider and wider until it is safe, and put a meetingarea-zone in it. "dwarven jacuzzi"

- dump unwanted clothes and crafts and leather armors into magma, if you have a magmaworks or otherwise nearby magma.

- if one of 30 soldiers is being stupid and fighting the hostiles inside the trap-corridor — remove her from her squad.

- blunt weapons may be too ineffective due to a DF silliness in armor calculations: cloaks and robes are large, therefore the mace impact is spread to the whole robe's surface. Can arena-test by robes team vs. pants/tunic team.

- "The obsidian caste's fire itself isn't really deadly. I've seen elven merchants just walk through it and also sent some of my soldiers through it and nothing bad happened. It's a bit sad that way. The only thing the obsidian dwarves really do as far as I've seen is give unhappy "choked on smoke underground" thoughts.
Aspid dwarves however are pretty awesome if you can get a squad of them. They can insta-paralyze a forgotten beast and destroy it before it's moving again. I still think however that the only good soldiers are steel dwarves that become ridiculously uber if you take good care of them (train early, train a lot and full masterwork sun gold)."

Deon: "There are no trap-avoiders amongst goblinoids and demons, but I might make a caste which does that.
I like to give people a choice either to run a pure trap defence, traps + soldiers or just soldiers."

There's many modes of creature scaredness:
1. FLEEQUICK, good for birds and rabbits and cowardly kobolds
2. normal
3. LIKES_FIGHTING
3+ LIKES_FIGHTING, NOPAIN, NOFEAR, good for Troll and Colossus
Can add more viewrange and speed to the birds to make them very hard to catch by running after them with an axe.

The military: Basically the squads are in five modes:
A) stand there, wait for hostiles to come
B) chase chosen target
C) train individually, at will at barracks
D) active training, demos, sparring
E) scheduled stand-there and patrol routes (this one can be mostly ignored as training is better than "run around until enemy squad pops on you")

I find the interface manageable, except when order squad to kill (from list) multiple wild animals, they mostly just stand there unless one of the targets walks past. Commanding "squad A kill list Warthog1" works fine, apparently because it's a single target.

Need to do the "equipment pickup shuffle" (hey squads, stand here to assemble) before send them out properly.